Culture : Do Britons Mind Their P's and Queues? Not Anymore, Social Critics Contend : The breakdown is a 'great threat to our sense of stability and order,' one frets. Even royalty is trashing the tradition.

By WILLIAM TUOHY

April 5, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

LONDON — The queue, that long-standing exemplar of British convention, is under threat--from within.

A most distressing habit, queue-jumping, is on the rise and may well be threatening civilization as the British know it.

The queue--the traditional first-come, first-served file of customers, more or less in a straight line--has been faithfully observed here since the dimmest memories of cultural observers. British queue for buses, for taxis, for food, for tickets, for just about everything. Quietly and politely.

As a wag once put it: “An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.”

For more than a century at least, the British have professed to abhor the practice of scrambling for tickets, seats or anything else, the every-man-for-himself scrimmage that Britons believe is characteristic on the Continent, particularly in the Mediterranean areas that the British describe as Latin.

But times clearly are changing.

It was big news in the British tabloids, for instance, when Prince Charles, on a recent skiing vacation in the Alps, announced that he and his sons, princes William and Harry, would queue at the crowded ski lifts. Charles’ private secretary, Cmdr. Richard Aylard, revealed: “The Prince does not want the boys to go through life thinking they can jump queues. They will queue here like everyone else.”

But when the royal party arrived to find a line of 300 skiers and a 45-minute wait, the signals were suddenly switched--purportedly on security grounds--and the prince’s group moved directly to the front of the line. So much for the egalitarian education of the young princes.

These days, queue-jumping is becoming more frequent in Britain, and an Oxford University psychologist, Peter Collett, sees danger to traditional British civility in this trend. The breakdown of queuing, Collett said, is a “great threat to our sense of stability and order,” which could lead to “highly charged” situations.

In a new book called “Foreign Bodies, a Guide to European Mannerisms,” Collett identifies the various types of queue-jumping afflicting British civilization.

Jockeying, he said, consists of shifting from one line to another in a multi-queue supermarket to find the fastest line.

Colonizing is keeping a sharp eye open for another cash counter or ticket window to open and dashing to reach the head of the new queue.

Then there are the transgressors who pretend that they didn’t notice a queue and slip into an up-front gap in the line.

“What’s remarkable about jockeying and colonizing is that they are regarded as quite legitimate, even though they contravene the basic rule about first-come, first-served,” Collett said.

That tradition has some remarkable permutations in Britain, even in these days. In some instances, Collett points out, the British don’t queue physically, say in shops or pubs where they form “invisible queues,” expecting the person behind a counter to remember who is next to be served. Often, an orderly British customer will point to another person to indicate the first “in line.”

“This kind of self-denial is something the Latins do not understand,” Collett said, “unless it is performed with some ulterior motive in mind.”

Curiously, Collett said, in the middle of the 19th Century the French were considered a queuing nation, and the English borrowed the word queue from the French word, meaning “tail” and pronounced “cue.”

But somehow the cultural habits got reversed in Paris and London.

There are several reasons for queuing. American anthropologist Edward Hall said queues are found in societies where people are treated as equals and espouse the egalitarian ideal.

Queues also apportion a fair distribution of time, Collett said, and nations that value time and punctuality tend to favor queues--while societies that take a more dismissive attitude to time prefer to do without queues.

Eastern European societies tend to queue, Collett said, not so much from cultural heritage but because of the appalling shortages in consumer goods and other services. In the former Communist countries, queuing for foodstuffs has become a way of life.

The Italians, French and Spaniards are the least queue-conscious in Europe.

“This,” Collett said, “is because Latins do not accept the basic philosophy behind queuing, namely the idea that people should be served in the order in which they arrive. For them a queue is an imposition, an unwarranted form of regulation and interference, like the government.

“It is debasing, regimented, and it prevents individuals from using their intelligence and initiative to personal advantage.”

The British, Collett said, “have a compulsive need for orderliness, not in terms of requiring a neat and tidy environment, but in the sense of needing to know where they stand and what to expect.”

“They usually feel uncomfortable when the situation is fluid or where there is a general free-for-all--when goods are not priced, when they have to bargain over a purchase and when the rules of the game, so to speak, are not clear. Predictability is essential for the British.”

Joining a queue provides that, Collett said. “For the British, a queue is therefore a cameo of an idealized society, where everyone knows their place, accepts it and doesn’t try to steal an unfair advantage over others.”

But there may be a deeper, more primitive reason for the British penchant for queuing, the psychologist said.

“The British,” he said, “have gained a reputation for being slow to anger because they stand in disciplined lines, but the more likely explanation is that they are so easily angered that they need the protection of queues.”

The increasing practice of queue-jumping is partly due, Collett said, to the rise of the “me generation,” with people increasingly “out for themselves.”

Thus the decline of the British queue is rather sad to observe, Collett said. “There is an underlying principle that is under threat here--and that is the British principle of fair play.”